Another giant shoe has dropped in L’Affaire Petraeus. Not simply more specifics, but yet another General:

Gen. John Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is under investigation for what a senior defense official said early Tuesday was “inappropriate communication’’ with Jill Kelley, the woman in Tampa who was seen as a rival for David H. Petraeus’s attentions by Paula Broadwell, the woman who had an extramarital affair with Mr. Petraeus.

In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. had informed him on Sunday of its investigation of General Allen.

Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct its own investigation into what the defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley, who is married with children.

Really, at this point, what can you even say about the secret storm soap opera that roils within the rarified brass air of the US Military? This was just the last hit for a night that saw the emergence of the Shirtless FBI Guy (now under investigation himself by the Office of Professional Responsibility at DOJ) to a nightime search of Paula Broadwell’s home by the FBI.

There are too many tentacles, evolving too quickly, to go too deep on all the facts that have rolled out even in the last twelve hours. But the General Allen/Jill Kelley bit is fascinating. Remember, the handful of emails Paula Broadwell sent to Kelley reportedly did not mention Petraeus by name. This latest report at least raises the possibility Broadwell was referring to an inappropriate relationship between Kelley and Allen, and not Kelley and Petraeus. I am not saying such is the case, but it is also arguably consistent with the currently known substance of Broadwell’s emails to Kelley, so the question is valid to be raised.

A couple of other data points to note. First, Broadwell’s father made a somewhat cryptic comment yesterday that may be being explained now:

“This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out,” he told the Daily News.

“There is a lot more that is going to come out … You wait and see. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”

He said that his daughter, who’s at the center of the controversy that prompted CIA director David Petraeus to resign from his post, is a victim of character assassination, and that there’s something much bigger lurking behind the curtain.

They hired Abbe Lowell, a Washington lawyer who has represented clients such as former presidential candidate John Edwards and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And the couple are employing crisis PR person Judy Smith, who has represented big names like Monica Lewinsky, Michael Vick and Kobe Bryant.

Now, let’s be honest, an innocent recipient of a handful of crank non-threatening emails, as Kelley was commonly portrayed when her name first came out, does NOT need that kind of heavy hitter professional service. Seriously, Abbe Lowell is not only a great attorney, he is as preeminent a counsel as exists for spook and national security defense cases. No one in their right mind pays for that unless they need it, especially 1,000 miles away from his office.

Another oddity occurred last night: The North Carolina home of Paula Broadwell was searched for nearly four hours by a full on execution team from the FBI. From the New York Times:

On Monday night, F.B.I. agents went to Ms. Broadwell’s home in Charlotte, N.C., and were seen carrying away what several reporters at the scene said were boxes of documents. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case remains open, said Ms. Broadwell had consented to the search.

The key word in that quote that strikes me is “consensual”. Broadwell has lawyered up too, having hired prominent Washington DC defense attorney Robert F. Muse. If an attorney feels his client is the target of a proposed search, he does not consent, he makes the officers get a warrant and search for only what a court orders and nothing else. You have to wonder what was being searched for that Broadwell and her counsel were not more worried about?

It is still early in the Allen portion of this mess, but it sure does cast the entire matter in a new light. Seriously, 30,000 pages of communications between Allen and Kelley in two years? That is 41 pages a day. When in the world did Allen find time to make war? And keep in mind, Kelley had already been stated to be regularly (up to once a day) emailing Petraeus for some of that period…she must be getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

There is also the pressing question of exactly what the methods and means were for discovering and extracting these 30,000 some odd pages of communications between General Allen and Jill Kelley, and how that came to pass when she was supposedly and innocent victim of Paula Broadwell. There were already great questions in this regard about Broadwell and Petraeus. I will leave that for later, I suspect Marcy may have something to say on those issues.

Four-star generals. Two of them wrapped up in one salacious scandal. The Stones may need to modify their lyrics ever so slightly.

Bmaz is a rather large saguaro cactus in the Southwestern Sonoran desert. A lover of the Constitution, law, family, sports, food and spirits. As you might imagine, a bit prickly occasionally. Bmaz has attended all three state universities in Arizona, with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Arizona State University, and with significant post-graduate work (in physics and organic chemistry, go figure) at both the University of Colorado in Boulder and the University of Arizona. Married, with both a lovely child and a giant Sasquatch dog. Bmaz has been a participant on the internet since the early 2000’s, including active participation in the precursor to Emptywheel, The Next Hurrah. Formally joined the Emptywheel blog as an original contributing member at its founding in 2007. Bmaz grew up around politics, education, sports and, most significantly, cars; notably around Formula One racing and Concours de Elegance automobile restoration and showing. Currently lives in the Cactus Patch with his lovely wife and beast of a dog, and practices both criminal and civil trial law.

One wonders how it was that there was time to find the WMDs, win wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and bring democracy to wherever it was needed, in addition to all the heavy petard hoisting necessary to git-r-dun.

FWIW, Abbe Lowell likely would not take the case unless there was a lot of there, there. And someone has to be paying his serious freight; I can see someone of his stature asking for and getting a cool million for an upfront retainer.

Speaking as someone with more than a little experience in dealing with documents in litigation, I can say the cost of dealing with 20-30k pages in this context is not going to be cheap at all. Figure there will have to be a detailed line-by-line parsing of the documents (as opposed to a more cursory review) and a timeline constructed which will make one of Marcy’s look positively superficial. To give some perspective, I once second-chaired a “cold-case” murder trial where there was no weapon, no one saw the actual stabbing, and the guy wound up dead a couple miles from the alleged scene, exsanguinated while wearing unstained light-colored pants, in an unstained snowbank with no footprints around his corpse. There were only a couple hundred pages of old and new statements and forensics, and it took me a good two weeks full time (and wall charts to rival that “Homeland” commercial) to both try to suss out the prosecution’s theory and to come up with alternatives. There’s a lot of work to be done for Abbe’s staff, likely it will be classified in whole or in part (adding expense) and all this points to serious coin being required. Where that’s coming from is a really good question.

As noted in the main article, if the good general had time to be emailing/reading/writing 20k pages with someone we’re being led to believe was a groupie, it removes any reason to wonder why the A-Stan war is going so badly: he was too busy tending his love life and not his job. (Generals having groupies: what a concept. Not a new one nor a surprise, though.) Of course, that may be exactly the conclusion the people leaking all this want us to draw. I noted in the background that this is seeming more and more like cleaning house of generals whose subordinacy, judgment or ambition (political or otherwise) has managed to offend the Admin.

And, as to consenting to the search, this could be one of those “consents” where either she’s already rolled and the search (with reporters in attendance) is more for show than real, or she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. Still have to wonder whether Broadwell was, according to the old Russian usage, a “swallow” – what we call a honeytrap – and, whether perhaps she was working for a different part of the USG rather than a foreign service.

So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share right now, what’s mine
And then the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all
Ooh, the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all

Hey, the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all
Hey, the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all
Hey, the harder they come, the harder they’ll fall, one and all

Bleary-eyed journalist made a mistake and said “her” not “his”? The shirtless FBI guy was the FBI friend, right? More than one FBI friend? Shirtless FBI guy was not the FBI friend but was another person involved in the investigation?

20,000-30,000 pages sounds more like her PhD thesis research or the backup research for her book. No one has stated that they only took hard copy of emails, or that there were any hard copies of her email account.

For now, I am going to assume that Jill Kelley’s communications with Allen had nothing to do with sex. Have read somewhere in the last few days that Petraeus also regularly communicated with her while in Afghanistan, and that his staff usually handled communications.

So that leads back to question as to nature of “inappropriate” emails to Allen. Could it be that Kelley was the conduit in some sort of private intelligence network?

Would explain the need to hire a high-priced DC lawyer who specializes in national security cases.

@GulfCoastPirate:
Check out the web for the twin sisters’ appearance on the Food Network. One article makes specific mention of the the their attire. One wore Chanel, and one work Brooks Brothers.

Does the twin sister have the sort of career that leads one to believe that she can afford couture clothing? Not sure wives of wealth doctors (the kind that live in $1 million homes) can afford that either.

Twins are from Philadelphia area, where parents owned restaurant. Upper middle class perhaps, but not from the sort of means that pay for couture clothing.

Wow. While of course no one quite saw this coming, I see we were on the right track in questioning the CW that Broadwell’s intervention with Kelley was all about Broadwell wanting preserve her priority with her f-buddy. In her (only partially self-appointed) role as advocate for Petraeus, Broadwell obviously also saw herself as his guardian. She knew Petraeus had regular contact with Kelley and had some reason to think this fishy that wasn’t about sex appeal (or, perhaps, was only partly about sex appeal).

But so very many oddities. If Kelley is a spook, then she sure ain’t no pro. Can’t see a pro inviting the FBI to the party. Plus, if she were in the regular employ of a foreign power, one would think that her handlers would have developed a better ‘legend’ for her than Rich Housewife Who Happens To Like Doing Nice Things For The Good Men At The Local Military Base (Which just Happens To Be The US Central Command) For No Pay. No, she would have been set up with some kind of job. So, if a spook, she’s some kind of freelance stringer or perhaps, accidental, unknowing spook. Or maybe tradecraft standards have plummeted.

. . . a timeline constructed which will make one of Marcy’s look positively superficial.

Come now, scribe. Have you such little respect for the proprietor of this place? Surely you realize that Marcy only posts the simplified versions of her timelines. The complete ones would probably crash the servers.

But the Abbe Lowell thing caught my eye for the same reason it caught yours and Marcy’s. Quite frankly, if this were a simple sex story, she’d be hiring Gloria “Where’s the Camera?” Allred. Instead we get Abbe Lowell.

Don’t we need an adult in charge? Who HAS O tasked with being the point person? And when, given height of those who seem to be destined to fall, will the pres appoint a special counsel or in some way try to take this out of the realm of competing agency politics and keystone cops.

Another thought, just because we “lefties” get so beaten up for our negative outlook on things governmental, and military: reflect on Betraeus and Allen. Regardless of what may be shown to have really transpired (if it ever is), these are the oh-so-highly-respected — nay, revered — representatives of America’s “finest”. With a h/t to those who do their duty in the military, at all levels, some will find a degree of institutional schadenfreude. I suppose I’m somewhat guilty of that.

But should this caught-with-pants-down-around-the-ankle farce be a wake up call that the structure of the MIC, and the reverential underlying assumptions that are used to disenfranchise and discount us ordinary citizens are a crock and need to be constantly challenged. But I rather expect the wagons will circle and we will be told this is all just an aberration — and we should continue to throw billions of dollars at these clown and to act impressed at their next grand scheme to save America from the really evil people.

Acknowledging human foibles, of which I have at least as many as is my share, we have met the enemy, and you know the rest. Acknowledge these high level trysts; but let’s stop pretending these guys are oh-so-special.

@FrankProbst: Cooperation, use immunity, who knows? Maybe it is actually material she and her attorney think helpful or exculpatory and they didn’t want to hassle with all the press outside so sent the FBI boys. I dunno, but there is some reason for permitting it without the overview and restriction of court warrant.

Not an attorney — but have several in my family. Wouldn’t one have to be a fairly successful one to afford that kind of clothing? Especially if one were also still fairly young, and supporting a family?

FYI– not being petty here. Have seen the use of very expensive clothing before as a way to influence a certain kind of woman. Palin comes to mind…

There’s basically Team Betraeus/Broadwell and, apparently, Team Kelley/Allen. And all the ancillary players. Knowing how our highly evolved media loves to define things into right/wrong, winners/losers, etc., perhaps Broadwell is simply trying to get out ahead of the curve (though it would take a rocket to do so) and come across on the side of (relative) righteousness. She does, I presume, continue to want a big career. So, despite lawyering up, I might suspect that, until such time as she is informed of criminal charges, she is going to attempt to write her own story. She doesn’t seem averse to publicity.

@DonS: Actually, Broadwell has been in radio silence since this broke into the open, and would assume the attorney is running the show. No decent lawyer, and Muse is VERY experienced and good from what I can discern, allows that without a specific reason for doing so.

I don’t know if this has been mentioned before,but isn’t the FBI under Eric Holder’s domain?*

And if I am not mistaken,didn’t he go public with his plans to possibly leave the AG office right about the same time Petraeus announced HIS resignation? Fast and furious,indeed…

*According to Wiki:

Although US Attorney General Eric Holder was aware early on that the FBI had discovered an affair,[176] it was not until November 6, 2012, that Petraeus’ nominal superior, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, was advised.

So let’s say that Ms. Kelley is part of some Tampa-based spook ring of some unknown agency (foreign, other USG, maybe MIC contractors?) who wants some dirt on Afghan operations. I assume, given the pictures of Ms. Kelley on TV today, that this may have been in part a military sex ring scandal, which is *perfect* for military blackmail as adultery is a very serious crime under UCMJ. The fact that she is a State Dept military liason also makes me think some kind of spook operation too.

Anyway, the question is, for who? Who has the most to gain by knowing the detailed and possibly classified operations of what’s going on in Afghanistan? Because I’d bet a whole lot of money that much of the 30K pages of emails are actually classified documents about Afghan operations that Gen. Allen was emailing to his blackmailer. I’m sure there was some sex talk too, but I doubt it was the lion’s share.

Alternatively, though I don’t think this is likely, Ms. Kelley may have been an undercover agent for the FBI investigating abuse in the Afghan command. However, if that were the case, she is obviously not very professional, having involved the other FBI agent in it and completely blowing the case wide open.

Definitely more than meets the eye here. Someone is behind Ms. Kelley, and I think Broadwell accidentally stumbled on it and is trying to protect Petreaus’s interests and legacy so that more damaging info doesn’t come out.

@emptywheel: I agree with the “let them see it all” MO being the explanation. Let’s see, a passing observer of the development of the Surveillance State might have noticed that (1) they can get absolutely anything (and probably already have it); and (2) the thought process that has evolved to the point where they are allowed to get absolutely anything is premised upon “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear or hide”. So if you find yourself caught boinking the head of the CIA and you would like to be cleared of treason some day — and if you weren’t trying to be treasonous but would like people to believe you were just boinking the head of the CIA and maybe not put you in prison, too — then it may be rather smart to both appear to be and actually be as cooperative as humanly possible on the “what would you like to see” side. After all, saying “no” to people who have probably already got copies of your e-mail isn’t all that likely to keep anything hidden. It’s likely a new facet of crisis communications as far as disgraced paramours go, another gift of the War on Terra.

Well, again, it’s only a possibility I’m suggesting. But she’s Mrs. Kelley, nee Khawam, from a Lebanese Christian family. She may have inherited strong opinions about the region CentComm is responsible for. Or she may have grown up speaking Arabic, or at least hearing it at home, which might have made her a useful back-channel for Allen. If so, given the investigation, it obviously wasn’t authorized properly.

Not that we know enough to make any this likely. I’m just exploring possibilities. If she was a back-channel for Allen, she may not have felt she’d done anything wrong, making it somewhat reasonable that she went to the FBI despite having “inappropriate” emails from Allen.

30,000 pages is documents. I’m liking the idea that Kelly was part of a sideline analysis gig. Was it Peterr yesterday telling us that she may speak or read Arabic? (edit: ah, ryan, thanks) If she’s in the game, her social-liaison cover makes more sense, and the money was probably good.

Man, you work in the lab late, work out early, and look what happens. BTW, TeeVee treadmill report: Fox this morning was just completely gobsmacked; they’re just reporting the fast-breaking details, looking confused but concerned, then going ominous and saying things like “this certainly raises more questions”. Duh. MSNBC is just skipping most of it and going for the Fiscal Cliff Bar. ESPN is talking quarterback concussions, nothing about the idiot Laker management.

Yes, the pols are going to want Holder’s scalp. And he’s going to have to have a really good explanation for the leaky ship if he wants to leave on his own. Not that it’s that important, with the election over, but the repubs are going to try to weight the scandal as favorably as they can for their own advantage.

The pols are going to be dancing around faster that a bead of water on a hot griddle trying to figure out how to blame it all on the other side. They must be tres pissed if they’re only getting snatches in real time like the rest of us.

@emptywheel: I think it is Drake or nothing. There are no known target letters and no ongoing proceedings, there is nothing to prevent witnesses/participants from talking with each other so am not seeing requisite basis for obstruction. That’s why I am so interested in the circumstances of last night’s search, it would help frame a whole lot.

@What Constitution: O was running this secret spy ring that used two mid-thirties bombshells to bring down our mighty Republican warrior so he can’t run for president in 2016, and now apparently another, all while hiding the secret traitorous Benghazi plan that planned to kill his good friend the ambassador and stonewalling it all until the week after the election even though the Republican congressman had it the week before. There, see? It’s simple.

At the risk of stating the obvious, all of this would be clearer if we knew more about Jill Kelley and her shirtless FBI friend. Those two are clearly at the center of all these wrinkles, and despite the latest wave of revelations, the big questions are still the same: Why was all this brought to Cantor? And how did the FBI ever come to embark on an investigation of some snarky catty emails? And the answers, so far as anyone can tell, are that Cantor was notified because Kelley’s FBI friend started making noises among what congressional contacts he had (i.e., Reichert and/or associates), and the FBI looked into Broadwell’s gmails because Kelley asked her FBI friend for help.

I find it very hard to believe that Kelley is playing any kind of professional game here. She can call up Petraeus and notify him of the details of an ongoing FBI investigation (probably), and she and Allen are exchanging documents like crazy—granted all that looks really odd. Also she’s got at least one person inside the FBI to run her errands/leak her information. But what kind of spook would call in the Feds? Surely no kind of spook at all. Hanlon’s Razor seems the appropriate tool here.

Otherwise, it strikes me that both Broadwell and Kelley were attempting to act, however wrongheadedly, in Petraeus’s interests. Broadwell by swatting away some tedious socialite, and Kelley by going to her FBI friend when she received strange emails that suggested some unauthorized party had access to protected details of Petraeus’s travel schedule. And note that Kelley continues to act in Petraeus’s interests when her FBI firend reports back. She tells Petraeus that the emailer is Broadwell, thereby tainting the investigation and putting both Petraeus and Broadwell on guard.

@Frank33: the odd thing about the old idea that adulterers and gays were unsuitable to be spies because they were subject to blackmail is that people who had long felt they had to act to cover some of their innermost feelings were probably the best spies. I think the twin thing is interesting because in the same way, we may have someone who grew up with regular chances to practice pretending to be someone she was not.

A more substantive point – I think this line is interesting, from the NYTimes report:
>“Generally, the nature of the e-mails warranted providing them to D.O.D.,” he said.

This line seems to distinguish the Allen-Kelley correspondence from the Petraeus-Broadwell correspondence, since I’ve not heard that any of the Petraeus emails were turned over to DoD to investigate. It’s another sign that we may not be talking about romance, or strictly romance, between Allen & Kelley.

@ryan: Don’t suppose Ms. Kelly could have been working with Gen Allen on a book project? That would explain the thousands of pages via email. I’d rather have that then find out Kelly was a pass-through recipient for someone/something else.

Also: remember last year when the result of the unsecurable military data blowup–they said basically “we can’t secure anything”–happened? Could some commands have figured out their own off-the-shelf commercial communication system, using trusted recipients not on the Mil system? Probably not, but…at this point anything goes.

@ryan: Isn’t a romantic connection between Kelley and Allen precisely what *would* explain the Allen-Kelley vs. Petraeus-Broadwell distinction? Because Allen, as current commander, is subject to the UCMJ and its anti-adultery strictures, the matter went to the DOD. Petraeus wasn’t, so it didn’t.

Were both these girls free-lance spys protecting their lucrative marks?
Kelley used her FBI boyfriend to check on who was encroaching on her territory. Someone at the FBI figured it out and took it further than she expected. Time to drop charges against Manning and Assange.

“Kelley received an award last year for her support to Central Command and was named an honorary ambassador for the command, an unpaid position with no official duties. But she has angered some senior officers for what were described as persistent efforts by her to forge close personal ties to successive Central Command four-star officers by deluging them with emails, a former Central Command aide said. After being named honorary ambassador, she asked the command for staff at the headquarters to help her organize social functions, a former U.S. official said.”

So this was Kelley’s MO, and Broadwell wasn’t the only person who found her irritating.

“The FBI is currently investigating a slew of emails between her and General John Allen – “20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails” exchanged between 2010 and 2012, messages that have been called “flirtatious” by a senior defense official.”

>David Khawam said his sister (Jill Khawam Kelley) was a born giver, who early on channeled her charitable efforts into political fundraising and later to the military.

>Khawam said that quality stemmed from the Catholic family’s persecution in their native Lebanon, when Jill, David and Natalie were small children and their parents eventually fled to the United States.

I’m not saying this is a motive for anything nefarious. Just that it’s part of who she is, and might offer a motive for a) providing help to generals who she perceived as fighting the enemies of her family; or b) providing help to others about whom she felt the same.

@ryan: I don’t think anyone can make any claims about anyone’s motives in this just yet, and I certainly wouldn’t take anything in the Post at face value.

You’ve got high level military and spook brass with top level security clearances with their johnson’s flapping in the wind. Safe to say, sex is the least interesting thing about anything going on here.

HONORARY CONSULAR OFFICERS As a matter of U.S. policy, honorary consular officers recognized by the U.S. Government are American citizens or permanent resident aliens who perform consular services on a part-time basis. The limited immunity afforded honorary consular officers is specified in Article 71 of the VCCR. Such individuals do not enjoy personal inviolability and may be arrested pending trial if circumstances should otherwise warrant. However, appropriate steps must be provided to accord to such officers the protection required by virtue of their official position. In addition, the consular archives and documents of a consular post headed by an honorary consular officer are inviolable at all times and wherever they may be, provided they are kept separate from other papers and documents of a private or commercial nature relating to other activities of an honorary consular officer or persons working with that consular officer.

She became the honorary consul for South Korea in August. Is she trying to hide something?